Running with the Blind

This is a touching, uplifting article about a guy running the NYC marathon with a blind person, helping her achieve her goal.

About 15 years ago, I volunteered with the Achilles Track Club, which is for disabled runners, at the NYC marathon. My story is neither touching nor uplifting. It’s moderately amusing though.

Pre-kids I was a runner. I ran several marathons, but this was an off year (I forget the exact year). A friend asked if I could help the Achilles Track Club. They had a legally blind runner doing the marathon, and he was pretty fast (3:10 was his goal). They needed volunteers to run with him along the course.

If you think about it, this is quite tricky. Nothing would be worse that having a disabled runner not meet his goal because the runner assisting him hit the wall. So they always have multiple people assisting. In this case, since he was fast, they split up the course so there would be two people running with him for about 6 or 7 mile splits, then pass him off to the next two.

So me and one other guy were going to assist him from miles 14 – 20. We waited at the 14th mile marker. But we had been told that the mile marker was in a certain spot. It was actually a little farther down the road and on the other side. Not a big deal.

Time passes. We know the guy’s pace. He should have been here by now. This is 15 years ago, people aren’t running the marathon with cell phones. We have no way of knowing where he is. There’s one other volunteer from Achilles there. He suggests that the two of us sprint ahead to try to find him. The concern being that if they missed the mile marker (since it wasn’t where we were told), the people running with him are going longer than expected and may tire.

So we sprint off. This is actually one of the best parts of the marathon. When you come across the 59th street bridge into Manhattan around mile 15 the crowds are simply amazing. But we can’t find the guy.

At mile 16, the guy I’m running with says, “hey, I told my kid I’d be assisting a blind guy. He’s watching up ahead a bit. Can you pretend to be blind?”. Why not? I run a mile with my hand on the guys shoulder as though he’s guiding me. We get a ton of “Go Achilles!” cheers, which makes me feel somewhat fraudulent, but the kid cheers his dad so it seems worth it.

We make it to the 20 mile marker where the next two runners are waiting and still no one has seen the blind runner. There’s really nothing we can do at this point. The guy asks me, “what do you want to do?”. “Finish the race?”. Again, why not?

It was a great way to do it. You get the crowds of the NYC marathon and we only had to run half of it. But the finish wasn’t nearly as rewarding as when I did it for real.

What about the blind guy, you ask? We would later find out that he didn’t connect with the very first group of runners who were helping him. He was legally blind but not totally blind, so he just talked to other runners who helped him along the way. He finished around 3:15.

Go Achilles!